Donald Trump and his right-hand man Elon Musk have frozen large sums of foreign aid and taken an axe to America’s vast international aid agency – USAID.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is America’s main federal agency providing foreign aid to the rest of the world.
America has the largest foreign assistance programme in the world, and its spending makes up roughly 40 per cent of all global foreign aid.
Continuing a tradition of American largesse going back to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, Kennedy said America needed the agency to fulfil its moral, political and economic obligations to the rest of the world.
A 2019 survey found that 35 per cent wanted to increase economic aid to the needy, 33 per cent wanted to keep it the same, and 28 per cent wanted to decrease it.
